North Shropshire MP Helen Morgan has demanded |Steve Barclay, the new Health Secretary, makes fixing the ambulance crisis his number one priority after replacing Sajid Javid.

Mrs Morgan contributed to a cross-party debate with tales of constituents, including an 85-year-old woman with dementia who had to wait 18 hours for an ambulance to arrive at her home in north Shropshire after suffering a suspected broken hip.

She also noted the huge scale of problems facing all of the health system, including bed-blocking in hospitals, struggling social care and over-capacity A&Es such as those in Shrewsbury and Telford where a critical incident has again been declared this week.

She said: “I’ve had an adjournment debate with the minister on this subject, and a meeting with the former Secretary Sajid Javid.

"And yet this Government still hasn’t got a grip on this problem.

“As a proud resident of north Shropshire, I was aware of our ambulance crisis before I was elected in December, and before I started campaigning in November.

“But on the campaign trail and since being elected it’s become evident that the scale of the crisis is absolutely shocking.”

Mrs Morgan called on Mr Barclay to commission the CQC to investigate ambulance delays – a request which has been supported by the nursing boss of West Midlands Ambulance Service Mark Docherty.

He has previously warned that the ambulance service in the region is set to collapse entirely by August 17 as a result of the overwhelming pressure on the service.

She added: “The Government have failed to address it.

"They’ve thrown our hardworking doctors and nurses under the bus.

"We’re short of nurses, we’re short of carers, we’re short of GPs and we’re short of decision-making doctors in A&E.”

Mrs Morgan said that hardworking frontline NHS staff are “struggling to deal with a broken social care service, a hospital bed crisis and people who can’t access a GP and so are turning up at A&E”.

She continued: ”That is why Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust have declared yet another critical incident this week. I have literally lost count of the number of times that has happened this year.”

The situation is set to get worse this year, with research by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine finding that two-thirds of A&E clinical leads are not confident their organisation will safely manage winter pressures.